Two Bots, One Side (…or “how can they screw you”)

Hello everyone,

we talked about bots and now, we talked about what they can do and today, we will have a look at how they can screw you. This replay came from St0rmshadow and shows a typical situation, but with a twist. But let’s start first with getting the tools you are going to need to fight this.

Tools of the Trade

You will need the Freecam tool. It is a mod, that allows you to use free camera in replays (and ONLY in replays). Yes, this is legal. Without it, you won’t be able to see the botting behavior. You can get it here:

http://www.ulozto.net/xJP6mdPh/avatar-input-handler-xml

Installation – simple: just copy the file you downloaded into your World of Tanks\res_mods\0.8.10\Gui folder
(it’s possible there is no Gui folder in the 0.8.10 folder, in such a case just create it)

How to operate it – it’s very simple:
- start the replay
- wait for the countdown to finish (!)
- press left mouse button once to “unlock” the camera
- press CAPS+F3 to activate the free camera mod
- control free camera with classic WSAD, mouse wheel changes your “altitude”

2 Bots, 1 Cup Battle

Okay, now for the replay – you can download it here.

So, what do we have here:

shot_035

Dramatis personae:

Rostam_ (Churchill III) – a Tankleader bot
EYESOFNIGHT (KV-1) – a Tankleader bot

That’s right – there are TWO FUCKING BOTS on ONE team on TWO highest tiers. When you look at the replay, you can follow either of them around. Both of them get killed early in the battle (no surprise there), screwing the entire team in the process – still think a bot is a good idea?

How do you recognize them as bots?

- a very telling is the “gun drop” when they move. Basically, until he “finds a target” a bot just aims into the ground and drives around like that. As soon as he loses the target (and doesn’t switch to any other target), the gun goes back down into the “idle” position
- very twitchy turret movement (notice that on the KV-1)
- very specific movement pattern – notice, how when the bot runs into an obstacle, he immediately reverses, traverses the hull a bit and goes forward, when he runs into the obstacle again, he repeats it. It can be illustrated by this picture:

St0rmshadow said, regarding this replay:

“KV-1 starts with a gundrop, that is typical for the Tankleader bot. Be aware though – gundrop might not always mean it’s a bot, it can happen during disconnects also, but it is usually a bot sign, especially when the bot is moving. Just to clarify: a gundrop is when the battle starts and the gun immediately goes to its maximum depression.

Shortly after, he rammed a teammate and very typical Tankleader bot behavior happens: the bot backs down a few meters, rotates the hull by 30 degrees to the side and starts moving forward again. If he runs into an obstacle once more, it does the same thing again.

After that, the bot stays in the forest for a while, as if AFK – after that, he suddenly drives into the field for no reason, its gun is pointed always in the same direction. It doesn’t react until it has a clear line of view of its target, that is another typical sign of a Tankleader bot. It doesn’t even react on being shot – a human player would try to take cover, or would at least turn its turret to face the enemy.

The second bot (ROSTAM_) has exactly the same signs of being a bot. In this case, the problem is the bot drove out of the rendering distance.”

There you have it. Two bots, one battle, same team. Either the guy who submitted it was extremely unlucky, or the problem is much worse than Wargaming claims. You be the judge of that…

74 thoughts on “Two Bots, One Side (…or “how can they screw you”)

  1. They should auto ban people with that kind of stats…. under 500 wn8 (or whatever rating you want) = permaban

    • Interesting… I had seen similar behaviour before, but never thought bots could manage so much. I’d say the bot simply played like a regular (new/bad) player without much situational awareness. The bots had corresponding win rates as well (42-45%). I think if the bot program corrects the gun and twitchy turret/tank behaviour, it would be very hard to classify these as bots.

    • My GF has WN8 322 – she doesn’t care about stats and she constantly unlocks new tanks (therefore most of the time playing stock). She has some 1600 games, some of them fairly good (like an arty on the top of the team, still losing).

      You’d ban her for that? Well, screw you too~

      • You can’t ban on WNx because 1. real players really are that bad, and 2. WNx relies on other players being worse to get you a good score, eventually it will drag good players down to that level because all that will be left are good and unicum.

        And of course WG don’t do WNx, or ban players for being bad.

          • The “Ban due to low WN8″ idea is good, yes… It WOULD get rid of bots and everybody who doesn’t do their best to contribute (I’m not saying to be deep purple. I’m saying to help their team), but we must remember that there are mentally challenged people, or people with disabilities playing too, and they will have bot like stats… Sadly, we can’t account for that, and they too have the right to play.
            Thing is, it’s not the same to be bad because you don’t care about the objective, you just want to drive around watching the scenery and the particles fly when you shoot the dirt, than to be bad because you can’t do better.
            The real problem with WoT player wise is that players sometimes don’t try, and that hurts ANY game. I don’t understand playing without the interest to try to do the best you can.

  2. I would think bots are more common than WG admits,its the by-product of the grind.
    Torture players with the grind and this is what happens,
    They even have gifs”wot survivor”on WT forums.

      • WoT is the only game ever where I SUFFERED to lvl up, stock vk3001p, pz 3A, A-42.. After a while I learned to avoid entire branches if theres a shitty tank in it past tier 5.

            • So let a “skilled one” give you some advice. L2p.

              Played SU101, SU100M1, 38NA, A-20 and many more. There is no Tank “impossible” to grind. Just look at all those tomato T10 lately (not bots. just retards) who managed it too.
              WOT is one of the easiest and fastest grinding to top Tier MMO ever.
              Try to grind youself a top Warship on Navyfield. THIS will get you some butthurt you never forget if you complain about WOT grinds.

              • Nah, the stock grind is pretty bad. I often refer to it as the worst pay-to-win concept on WoT, since you can skip it by putting in money. (Which is what a lot of players really worried about their stats do as well.)

                He isn’t saying that it’s impossible to grind or hard to get through – anyone can do it, it’ll just suck and that’s it.

                Also that there are worse games out there doesn’t really make it any better. It’s like comparing shit to diarrhea and saying shit is good because diarrhea is worse.

                I’m a “skilled” player as well according to the stats if that matters. :P

              • Oh god, the grind to a BB3 is hell in Navyfield, took me like a year and a half only to find out that the Bismark and literally the entire German BB line had few, if any redeeming qualities. I look at the people crying about WoT and just remember Navyfield…

                And pray World of Warships doesn’t go the same way because DAMN did Navyfield kill itself like no other.

              • funny how he said “above tier 5% and you go on and list a bunch of tier 4 tanks.

                Stock tanks are unreasonably shitty in WoT and there is little fun in playing a Tiger with a 7.5cm gun. It’s just sad how that is just accepted for the majority of the players that the first 50 to 100 battles in a new tank will be terrible because you’re essentially a tank of two tiers less except for the hit points.

        • Oh quit your bitching, all the grinds except arti are pretty short up until you hit tier 7

          Of the tanks you listed, the only really had one is the pz38 na, and that’s just because of the idiotic scout matchmaking.

      • The problem with the grind is any muppet can grind,no skill req, hence the 44% players at tier 10,makes such a stronk game.
        WG money grabbing market tactics has broke the game for the players and filled there offshore tax dodging bank accounts.
        SS can we have a sockpuppet detector like the bot detector.Am sure it would be going off on here alot

    • “They even have gifs”wot survivor”on WT forums.”
      made by so-called “fanboys”
      I have no idea why people always need to do this fanboy-wars. like “OMFG BATTLEFIELD SHIT PLEY CAL OF DUTI IS BETTA!!!11″, same with xbox, wot and wt, apple, samsung,…
      i play both games and i like both games. imo, they are both are quiet different in gameplay, you cant really say “this one is shit and the other one is great”

  3. That is just the problem of the fuckwits who are bot-grinding at the moment. There will be nothing done about the fuckwits who have bot-grinded their way to high tier tanks so have developed zero skill in the game and are poisoning the game for the rest of us

  4. Instead of spending so mcu effort finding bots, why not make them unprofittable. If you play like shit, you earn shit. WOW had sophisticated bots, but they were beaten by economic fix. If any human is also punished by economic fix, shame on them. It is better for game if retards worse than bots left.

      • They said only afkers and base campers who deal zero dmg will get 0xp. I think bots drive enough to not be punished with this feature. Otherwise suiciding scouts / banzai rushers would also get 0xp and creds.

    • It Has additional advantage. If average Player would earn xp faster than credits, he would more often upgrade vehicles to elite configuration and maybe stack some free XP for next one, instead of driving almost stock. For team balance and skill learning its better to grind credits and stay more time on every tier. Harder Economy also holds bad players from playing on high ones because of money loss. When I was new in wot I skipped first 5 tiers plsying stock because I had credits for next tier much faster than XP. I thought higher tier will be better and more cool, without noticing it fights harder enemies, while being stock is worse than tier lower but elite. Genius me :P

      • Because thats what we need. Less Creds for everyone to make ppl spend more money on prem acc and gold tanks. Dont dare to tell WG that.
        Its hard enough to farm creds even with prem acc and prem Tank to buy a hell of tanks. Ever grinded 6 T9s at the same time wanting to buy 6 T10s? Thats ~40mio credits to spend.
        A dmn pain in the ass….

    • That is complete horseshit, I have been playing for 2 years on and off, and cant count how many times my team folds while Im trying to do my job as a tanker and team player I get shit WR, shit eff. all because of matchmaker basing shit on others actions. Fuck that shit. change the rating system based on what the actual player does not on his teams fuck ups.

    • It’d all be fixed by a simple “Do less than your HP in damage, and your rewards are 0 experience and 0 credits”.
      (Any kind of assisted damage should count, for both the assister, and the assistee, so as to speak).

  5. You can bet your last dollar or coin, that this is only the tip of the iceberg. Some coder somewhere is working on the next three or four iterations and they will be a lot smarter.

  6. A single example means nothing. I am sure you might stumble over games with more bots, but even a game with 30 bots would not tell you a damn thing about the prevalence of bots. If 1% of the population is botting, you would have 500 bots online when 50K people are online. Especially if they infest a few particular tiers, odds are you will run into them.

    • thats not how it is, if 1% of population is bots, and population is 1milion(lets say), And bots play 24/7, you will have, 4-6bots every game out of 30players.

    • With about 100k bot licences sold in EU alone, I guess 500 bots online at any given time would be a real understatement ;)

      I must admit, though, often it is hard to actually personally “see” the more sophisticated (moving ;)) bots… Guess because they tend to die quite easily. I only saw one bot so far that was actually moving around in the opening 3 minutes of a battle, a Hellcat on a fixed “patrol path” on ‘Airfield’, which didn’t even pack ammo (the gun kept tracing me, but it never fired a shot in about 30seconds).
      Apart from that, yeah, the usual “wait five minutes and rush” or “hide in a bush at the map edge” bots can be easily seen, and I assume are massively in game reported.
      It’s really a pity how the EU office is doing the ‘Ostrich approach’ on this issue.

    • 1% of the registered population does not equal 1% of active population. Anybody who spent cash on WG account + cash on a license on a bot program will be active.

      Regular player will do 10-20 games per evening or less and will not be online every day.
      Botter will play 100-200 games a day every day.
      Do you see the difference?

      Thank you SS for posting these. Thanks to these posts i now have an explanation for what to me was very strange/dumb behaviour expecially in the beginning of the battle. Let me tell you, it is in almost every game on the higher tiers.

      I see almost no such dumb/bot behaviour on tier 1 (grinding a crew on the cunningham now for TB) where it should be if following the EU WG mantra *no bots, only newb players* where as soon as we move up the tiers such behaviour becomes apparent for all to see.

  7. - a very telling is the “gun drop” when they move. Basically, until he “finds a target” a bot just aims into the ground and drives around like that. As soon as he loses the target (and doesn’t switch to any other target), the gun goes back down into the “idle” position

    Many players (I do it as well, but very rarely) simply don’t move their camera untill they start the battle, and in such case the gun also drops (cause the initial FOV points the gun down). As later on they may press RMB, their gun would point down untill they decided to aim at sth.

    But yeah, if the tank drives like this and drops the gun after enemy disappears, that’s a bot.

  8. 2 bots, 1 side? How about 9 bots on one side and the other side has “only” 2? Every now and then you run into such battles in WoT CN.
    If there’s a battle where neither side has any bot everyone goes like “WTF? No bots? It’s a MIRACLE!” except in tier 12 battles. In tier 10 battles there’re still tier 8/9 bots.
    Having 2 bots as highest tier tanks in tier 5 battles is like eating rice for Chinese players now. And WG still doesn’t consider the development of a bot-autoban/autopunishment system an urgent demand. Those devs are seriously wrong about the problem of bots.

  9. According to replies from WG ambASSadors – there are no bots. It’s just players conspiracy.
    Dear Wga Rogalaf CZ or Wga Zynea CZ can you explain it for us – conpiracy make players ?

    Jenom se nudím v práci :)

  10. Last night I had a tier IX battle, when 13 tanks had gone to the same position near the base. They stayed at the same place to the very end. We, the only two live players hold one flank. We did together over 11k damage before been killed. Then the rest of the team was easily fast kiled. It might have been nearly 20 bots in one game. Nothing can surprise me after that.

    • I know how this feel dude. when you and 1 other guy hold an entire flank when 13 other died for nothing. Now (sorry) good to know it’s not just bad luck

    • Do you have replay….not that i don’t believe that happened i just wanted to see the replay with this free cam thingy :)

  11. It’s pretty clear to anyone who digs a little bit that the bot situation is far worse than most are willing to accept. I first became aware of how bad it really is about a year and a half ago. At the time I was a senior officer in a clan wars clan on the NA server. We had some software (a clan mate developed) to analyze opponents performance. it would pull the data for the enemies T10 vehicles so we’d have some idea of how good a team the enemy could field. Very helpful with landing battles and little known clans. Well to make a long story short when we upgraded the software one time it accidentally pulled all the players vehicles. I accidentally hit the sort from lowest win rate to high and was shocked by what I saw.

    Grouped at the top of the list were a bunch of premium vehicles with crappy eff, poor win rates and unnaturally low win rates for that player. It was quite obvious that a lot of players were botting premium tanks for credits… It was also obvious that they did play them at times. Some even had mastery badges. Yet, the vast majority of time they just botted these vehicles.

    Now these also happen to be restricted MM premium tanks. Ones that get special MM and are thus more often the top tanks than regular vehicles. I was angry. These people were hurting their teams to benefit their own greed and laziness.

    I started posting about bots on the NA forums. Calling for WG to do something before the problem got any worse. Only to be met with extreme hostility from the player base and complete silence from WG. I actually left the game for months. Frustrated at how incompetent WG was at doing anything about it. You’d report them and nothing would happen.

    I find it funny that players are so unwilling to accept the size and scope of this problem. All you have to do is the tiniest bit of research and you’ll know that most of those 0-low damage tanks in your battle were actually bots and not real players. They are effecting your gaming experience (and win rate) almost every battle.

    • I wouldn’t say they are bots. I have the lowest win rate on all my premiums compared to my other tanks.
      Just this week, I had a win rate of 20% for 3 days straight with my IS6. Took the overall win rate from 47 to 37 in 1 weekend :-)
      However, during the same time period I had like a 60% with my AMX 50 100 as well as several other tanks.
      I have no idea how you get a 20% win rate over say about 40 or 50 battles. Even an AFK tank shouldn’t be that bad. But sometimes it happens.
      However, maybe it is the perspective of the premiums in that people are trying to grind credits. For example, when I do this I will not use gold no matter what the situation. Lowers my win rate, but I earn more profit. If people are grinding credits only vs. playing to win, then this is probably expected

      • Don’t be silly. When I see players with 1600-1800 eff in their normal tanks then 200 eff in their premiums I KNOW something is amiss. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at the games played, kills, damage and win rate. To realize they are botting. I love how people counter with small sample sizes saying anyone can have a bad run of luck. When the reality is they (botters) do more battles in these tanks in two days than most of us have played on the majority of our tanks…

        • Well, you didn’t exactly post any specific data. Your sample size etc.
          I also love how people expect us to to be convinced by what they are talking about without any of us having the data in hand.
          I posted a completely reasonable explanation based on what little detail you provided. However, that explanation wouldn’t fit data of such extreme difference in eff rating which you didn’t post prior.

    • xoenus,

      What you jus told mades all sense to me.

      During the 3x and 5x specials people cry that many inactive players return to farm XP but I think that the majority are normal players with many tanks in the garage (50+) just farming the first daily win for each one of them with bot programs.

      A player with more than 10k games will not be much affected in his stats if he looses 60% of the games to farm the XP to all his tanks. Lets imagine a guy with 50 tanks. To get his 50 victories he loses roughly 70 games in 120. This 40% win rate in 120 battles compared with for example 60% win rate in 10.000 battles will have little impact on the overall stats and he happily farmed the XP without any effort at all.

      Last weekend I had many battles with good WR XVM % that turned in complete stupid defeats because the greens, blues and purples just behave very strangely and well below the performance expected from someone with good stats.

      I play MMO´s for more than 15 years and I know for sure that a lot of the best players/clans in all MMO´s use bots when the farming is hard/mind numbing. They are efficiency driven people to consider wasting their time grinding.

      Thank you for your heads up…now I understand why weekend specials have turned in such a mess.

      Red

    • The real question is how many “bad players” there really are and how many have just been bots all along….

      • xoenus,

        Actually with WG state of negation building better bots will be very lucrative for the people developing them.
        And with time they will have bots that will play the game as well as good players. I saw it happening in some PvP MMO´s, after 1 or 2 years the bots got so good that many real good players used them to improve their response time, aiming, etc.

        I will just give a small example (not talking about aiming better and at maximum distance because in a short time bots will do it better than the majority of players):

        Mini-map. One of the most common errors of human WoT players is to be too much focused on his small battle and forget to observe the mini-map and decide the best course of action. Many times people kill their direct opponent after an hard fight just to discover that the enemy is capping and there is no time to decap. In the future bots will not make that mistake because they will react immediately to all mini-map available information and will act accordingly. Here is an area where the bots will be better than the majority of WoT players.

        I fear that the future is not bright to WoT unless WG vigorously addresses this problem. It would be so easy to implement some kind of CAPTCHA mechanism.

        But even that, in my opinion, will fail in the future because we are going in the direction of real players behind the computer using bot programs to get better aim, reaction times and overall analysis of the battlefield.

  12. You guys are getting neurotic!
    Bots, bots, bots! I tell you what: 95% o fthe bot population bots tier 3 to 5 matches. Only idiots bot above. Very small number.

    What does a bot do in t3-5 matches? It plays as bad as 50% of the actual team! Yes, most human players are as bad or worse than the bot performs.

    What the hell are you shouting at? Who suffers from botting? You lose game after game because of botters? I hardly believe that!

    What is the real problem here?
    What do botters actually achieve with botting?

    Yes, they play all sorts of T10 machines which they free XPd. Machines you play weeks and weeks to get, a botter has right after the patch.

    HOW UNFAIR!

    • And your evidence that only 5% of the bots are above tier 5? I presume you have presonal experience but beyond that…? You have no clue right?

      As for your failure to understand why people suffer from botting, perhaps you should consider the word ‘multiplayer’. It means you play against humans rather than crappy AI. Its what people like about ‘multiplayer’ games. Its why people don’t like playing crappy AI in those multiplayer games. Pretty simple really.

  13. Why would you care about bots? Even the makers of WOT don’t give a shit about them. Look, WG can say whatever they want and act however they want. There’s no point of stopping bots if they bring profit to WG. Easy as that. WG’s goal with WOT is to make money, not to make a good game. Remember that.

    • You’re confusing our motivations to play an enjoyable, challenging multiplayer game against other humans, with WG’s motivation to make money. You don’t seem to grasp situations, even when they’re pretty simple. You’re probably a bot.

      • Listen you ignorant, this is not about how to make this game better, because you as a player will never make WG do anything unless they have such intention themselves. I was once a contributor in promoting teamplay, individual improvement, and condemn bots just like any other player who take this game seriously. But after years of observing WG’s take on players, I have realized that I was helping a evil organization grow bigger. WG is not worthy of anyone’s support, they do little to make WOT a better game, but mostly making it more efficent at bringing them money. Lack of grasp of the current situation? You’d be surprised what you can see once you stop playing this game for a while.

    • Ah, The slippery slope of morality….

      Well for one it’s against the rules of the game. A game some of us pay to play. All I ask is that WG enforce their own rules. Rules that I agreed to when I started playing this game. Secondly the bots win rates are low. Most are low 40′s to high 30′s. So the are effecting our game play. Those extra few percent have real costs to us in XP and credits gains. Their greed and laziness has a real cost for the teams burdened with them. So I care in short because it directly effects me…

      • Maybe it’s time for you to play a different game where the devs actually do something about bots. I know it’s not easy to switch after you have invest so much resourse and time into a game. However, I have found WG can not be persuaded into making a better game for players. The time and resourse you have given WG, has little chance in actually improving this game. So why complain and care about negative aspect of this game?

  14. I’d like to point out that the gun will always drop in the beginning of a match, as long as the player does not move the mouse (camera) to a different position than the original during the 30second countdown. So for example if a player takes longer than 30 seconds to load the match you will see his gun drop, and if you don’t touch the mouse and wait for the 30 second countdown to be over, the gun will drop as well, because the original position of the camera once the match loads will make that happen once you gain control of the tank. You can easily test that out, so don’t think that a specific tank is a bot just for the gun drop, as SS has pointed out.

    • That is true, however these two bots kept pointing their guns in the same direction the whole time they were moving around the map and only when they had clear line of sight on enemy tanks they moved their gun in that direction and as soon as they’ve lost sight their guns would immediately went to the previous position.

  15. My gun always drops at the start of a battle, if I don’t touch the mouse etc while the timer is counting down then when it hits zero the gun goes down.

  16. It seems that many are rather confused with max depression vs normal start depression.

    When normally starting a game your mouse will point somewhere forward point, but for most vehicles ( depending from your zoom ) it will be full depression for some and only teasy bits for others. It depends on terrain ahead. A wall or building will actually rise players aim, even on this situation a bot lowers its gun. I don’t know for sure and someone correct me, but bot aims fairly close to itself due to pathing, but this will most likely be corrected in further developements…

    It is still sad that the problem is large and there are players that are willing to incline in the existance of them when they are obvious. Even best players cannot mimic bots even if they wanted ( they have the knowledge how to lock, spot drive and avoid normal player behavior ). WG should had really made it in their thick skull when they wrote their EULA on how to deal with bots, that players are the best source to weeding them out and should take it seriously. This hurts the economy more than gives profit. Even if they spend money on the game there is always someone on the negative side due to problems in game.

    More polished and harsher punishments and more monitoring should be invested… it is not that hard actually when you start looking for players who play all along with practically no pause at all. Even as active player you will tinker at times. Bot has nothing to this. It simply plays and plays.

    The more time given to bots to develope ( especially those who gain profits ) the worse the plague will come as the bots become more sophisticated due time and harder to weed out. Also there should be practise of infiltration to any found bot sites… More often than not, there will be hints of botters littered all around them… Even if you just stay and watch and keep eye on.

    It takes resources, but when equally met the urge to make bots lessens in time… it makes no use as there is no one willing to risk nor try it due to harsh politics, maybe few thousand games at time and then slapped to the face. Even makers of bots are humans and lose interest in time. Inevitable course of action, why bother? When making a bot it took them to bother starting, but if you get nil results… what is the reward?

    • ThaElf,

      I fully agree with you. But I fear it will be worst than you think. The main problem will not be the full bots.
      We are going in the direction of having real players behind the computer using bot programs to improve their performance (aiming for weak spots at max distance, faster reaction time, perfect leading shot, etc).

      • I’d take that as challenge accepted. They are still fidling and muffling with sophisticated programs… And they are cheating. I know they might be better than me due … well being better than me and using those on top of it.

        But when that starts to become apparent problem… I’d say there is nothing to be done while the bots surpass humans on tactical level… Until then… Must keep sharp ( thout not played for near half year now ) …

  17. Damn, I always put my gun into an “idle” position at the beginning of each battle and then switch camera to sideways to check the gun depression. Does that make me a bot? LoL

  18. “There you have it. Two bots, one battle, same team. Either the guy who submitted it was extremely unlucky, or the problem is much worse than Wargaming claims. You be the judge of that…”

    Possibly a bit of both?

  19. I just had a game where T-50 scout with 3k battles played and 0 WN7 shot gold ammo at me. Best part is he managed to pen my side armor on T29 :D Obviously some faggot loaded gold ammo into his bot :D And on top of that this is the second evening in a row that both EU1 and EU2 servers died at peak hours. This game really turned to shit.

  20. I’ve often seen a bot where its turret justs sticks 90 degrees to the right and stays like that until something happens. also it seems to always camp/lag behind the lines as if it’s arty.